In the past 20 years, the Internet has been developing at a high speed. After experiencing two stages of PC Internet and mobile Internet, the whole industry is looking forward to the arrival of the third stage of the Internet. When the demographic dividend of the mobile Internet era is coming to an end, where will the next Internet dividend window appear? In his speech at NIUDAY Hangzhou Station, Xu Shiwei, CEO of Qiniuyun, pointed out his judgment on the next bonus window. As a cloud service enterprise born in the mobile Internet era, how should Qiniu Cloud embrace the dividends of the next era? Xu Shiwei expressed his views.
01/Evolution of the Internet
Everyone knows that the Internet is developing very vigorously, but in fact, looking back, the Internet has only 20 years of development history, but these 20 years are the fastest growing 20 years in human history** From this point of view, it is actually very interesting. I think everyone is lucky. We have witnessed the whole process of history.
I have analyzed the 20 years of the development of the Internet, and let's see what dividends the Internet has brought to us?
The past 20 years have developed very fast, but what stages have we gone through in the past 20 years? In fact, I personally divide it into several stages.
The first stage is PC Internet, which is from 2000 to 2010. From 2010 to 2017, there was a lot of mobile Internet, and Qiniu Cloud was also generated in the tide of mobile Internet. I think the reason why Qiniuyun can stand here today is that it has obtained the dividend of mobile Internet.
But in recent years, everyone can feel that the dividend of mobile Internet is disappearing, so where will the Internet go in the next stage?
You may hear a lot of hot words, such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, Internet of Things, etc. In fact, there are many hot words. What kind of words really represent the future dividend? I personally refined it into "industrial Internet", which may be the third stage of the Internet.
02/Mobile Internet dividend
Let's first look at the mobile Internet. What changes have taken place in the mobile Internet, which has led to the emergence of many emerging companies, including Qiniu Cloud.
1. Population dividend
In fact, the mobile Internet is the dividend of the population, that is, it has completed the original accumulation of the Internet and enabled everyone to access the Internet, which is the core change of the mobile Internet. In the PC era, the Internet was actually a small group, but today we find that the ultimate change of the entire mobile Internet trend is to let everyone connect to the Internet.
However, by 2017, changes may have taken place. We can find from some data that, for example, QQ has experienced a decline in active users, and WeChat's user activity growth is also very slow compared with the previous seven years. This is not to say that the potential of WeChat will disappear in the future. In my opinion, it is the end of the dividend of mobile Internet. It is precisely because mobile Internet is essentially a demographic dividend.
So when we are on the mobile Internet, investors often ask how many users you have and how much your company is worth. But then investors won't ask, because the dividend is over.
2. Connection revolution
In terms of mobile Internet technology, I think there is also a connection revolution. Because the Internet itself is a change of remote connection, that is, in the past, when we did business, we paid and delivered. But with the Internet, we can do business with people all over the world. So this is a process of people to people remote communication or connection. In the live broadcast conference of Qiniuyun a few years ago, I mentioned that today is in the LIVE era. When it was founded in 2011, many people thought of us as a picture cloud, but we saw ourselves as doing LIVE, essentially a connection revolution, which is how to make people communicate more naturally. So today's live broadcast and RTC will not be the end. There will be more VR and AR interactions in the future, This is essentially a connected revolution.
3. Internet becomes infrastructure
When the Internet finally settles down and turns it into a thing, it is actually a cloud. The cloud represents the Internet infrastructure. This is also the reason why Qiniu Cloud was born in the dividend period of mobile Internet.
In such a bonus period, * * Seven Bulls has always focused on one thing: connecting revolution** How to make people to people remote communication more natural is what we have been doing. Our products started with pictures, videos, and then live broadcast. In the future, there will be more interactive ways, even AR and VR.
So our view of ourselves is a focused company, not a huge cloud, but a vertical cloud, which is our view of ourselves.
03/Where is the next bonus?
Since 2017, I think The next dividend period of the Internet should be the dividend of industrial Internet. What is the dividend of industrial Internet? I think it is the technology dividend first. Because the Internet itself is an advanced productivity, such as the application of the Internet or mobile Internet before, but in fact, the main body is still in the virtual economy, doing entertainment and other applications in the virtual economy, including the popular second beat, beauty beat, etc., including today's popular dithering, etc., in fact, all in the virtual economy. However, the next biggest change of this technological revolution is the occupation of the Internet from the virtual economy to the real economy. In fact, this process is the "Internet+" that we heard more in 2017. in my submission The next step is a very parallel process, which is to experience such changes in all walks of life.
Why is AI very popular in 2017? This is because the technology dividend itself is also iterating. In fact, from the previous stage of mobile Internet, the core is remote connection, and then it naturally extends to the revolution of intelligence, that is, from connection dimension upgrading to intelligence, which is why we are talking about From 2017, the AI era will follow, not just the LIVE era.
We think the next biggest focus is industrial restructuring, because the division of labor in the upstream and downstream of the entire industry will change dramatically. Think about familiar industries, such as travel industry. Why is there a drop in the travel industry? Of course, there is Meituan now. In fact, there is another thing, that is, the company that makes cars. Car building is a very traditional industry. In fact, we haven't seen its evolution for a long time. But today we see a lot of people coming out to build cars, which is actually due to several basic evolution logic of the entire travel industry. * * One is the conversion of energy from gasoline to electric, and the other is due to the impact of the intelligent revolution, namely, automatic driving. In particular, automatic driving will produce a dramatic change in the division of labor between upstream and downstream of the entire industry** Because the driver disappears, when the driver disappears, it will actually lead to the merger of the upstream and downstream of the car manufacturing company and the operating car or taxi company.
So we can see the travel industry. If you pay attention to the travel industry today, you will find that basically many car manufacturing companies are trying to operate taxis, and operators like Uber will also try to build cars. These two industries, we thought it was a very reasonable division of labor, and then it became unreasonable. So this is a process of continuous reconstruction, and of course, the energy reform we just talked about is even more so. Because when the energy is changed from gasoline to electric, we will find that the core parts of the car are no longer the old engine. It actually needs to purchase a new engine part. Including charging, that is, energy supply, and from the gas stations we see everywhere today to charging piles, in fact, the upstream and downstream of the entire industry will undergo very drastic changes. In fact, travel has no particularity, Today, such things are happening in all walks of life, so this is the fission process of the Internet.
If we think that the Internet in front is still in a period of accelerated growth, then the industrial Internet is a fission period. The Internet is no longer borderless and has become much larger.
04/How does Qiniuyun embrace the new era?
Come back to our seven cow cloud. First of all, we should focus our attention and look more specifically, Let's start with the growth of video. Video is growing rapidly, and video content is increasing rapidly. If we stand in the perspective of video today, this increase is still in a very early stage. Video started in 2014, when there were beautiful pictures, second pictures, etc., which was the earliest stage of short videos. Today, we saw watermelon videos, dithering, etc., which was also a very early stage.
Source: 2017 China Online Audiovisual Development Research Report; we will see that video will be used more and more widely in all walks of life, whether we mention the so-called virtual economy or the real economy, or even the popular "urban brain", In fact, this kind of thing will have a very wide range of video applications in all walks of life, whether in transportation or agriculture. Why is this? This also echoes today's call for the "Internet of Things era".
I think the first step in the transformation of industrial Internet today is to complete the process of informatization in the physical world. There must be a lot of sensors. So we can see that sensors are the perception intelligence of machines from the perspective of human five senses, which is to replace human five senses. Machines also have five senses, even more than people. There may be six senses, seven senses and eight senses, so the perception ability of machines will be more and more generated in the future. This process will naturally occur with the whole industrial revolution iteration process.
Data source: According to the data study of Harvard Business School in 2007, vision is the most widely used of human five senses, accounting for 83% of human information interaction. * * This is a data study from Harvard Business School in the United States. Under such a background, Qiniuyun pays special attention to visual intelligence, so I think that in the AI era, if human beings want to evolve from the perspective of perception, the most important thing is visual intelligence, which is a very critical thing. So we were the first to enter the field of AI, and Qiniuyun first chose the field of machine vision. From the perspective of the complete map of Qiniu Cloud, today you may hear three keywords of Qiniu Cloud: the first is connection, which is the foundation of Qiniu Cloud, the second is visual intelligence, which is machine vision, and big data.
Therefore, we can clearly see the complete business map of Qiniu Cloud. From the product perspective, it can be roughly divided into several levels: first, containers, or virtual machines, which is the abstraction of computers, second, the early core of Qiniu Cloud - storage, audio, video, etc., and finally, the network.
In the three most basic computing, storage and network levels, we have live broadcast, on-demand, and real-time audio and video interaction. There are visual intelligence and data intelligence. What will Qiniuyun do in the next five or ten years?
I think the core is these two things: one is intelligent maintenance upgrading. We need to change from connection to intelligent company, which is easy for everyone to understand; The second is to advance the industry, that is, Qiniuyun will certainly enter the industry. So Qiniu Cloud has three keywords: "connection, intelligence and industry". I hope I can talk about what Qiniu Cloud is going to do when it enters the industry.
05/What is the value of Qiniu Cloud?
If we ignore specific products and abstract them, we think that Qiniu Cloud is an efficiency tool to accelerate for customers and shorten the distance from an idea to a product, which is what Qiniu Cloud has always been committed to.
We hope to make our customers more efficient, because we believe that innovation itself is bound to make mistakes. You are doing something different from what others have repeatedly done. What you are doing is unprecedented, and you are bound to make mistakes. But actually making mistakes is not terrible at all. The key is how to minimize the cost of making mistakes and how to make mistakes in the shortest time. Because for a start-up company, it is important to remember that "the biggest cost of entrepreneurship is the time cost", and the time cost is the biggest cost of entrepreneurship.
Therefore, we will continue to reduce the trial and error threshold for innovative companies, reduce the money and time costs of trial and error, and constantly release social creativity.
This is what Qiniuyun understands and knows about himself.
